Validating Windows

What does the Windows Genuine Advantage program mean for users? Maybe not much.

When product activation was announced for Microsoft Windows XP, the predictions from some were dire. Surely, it was argued, the onerous burden of performing the activation procedure and its certain failures to operate properly would finally inspire people to move from Windows.

Of course, things didn't turn out that way. Activation has been at worst a minor nuisance. We can expect the same outcome with the awkwardly named Genuine Microsoft Software program (www.microsoft.com/genuine), an antipiracy initiative that asks you to validate your copy of Windows. The program has been voluntary for some time, but will be made mandatory in the second half of the year.

Microsoft's descriptions of this initiative focus on the good things that will come from participating in the program. Some advantages are tangible: Get a free copy of Photo Story 3 for Windows, for example. Many, however, are just marketing goo about having the richest and most reliable experience. The real point of the program is to make you pay for Windows if you want to get all the things you need, like security updates.

In the new phase, when you want to download some Microsoft updates you will need to run an ActiveX control that confirms that your copy of Windows is activated and legal. If it's not activated, you'll be asked to activate it. If you don't have the key you need, you may be able to satisfy the program with information about where you bought your PC and Windows. To see exactly how this works, take a look at Microsoft's demo (www.microsoft.com/genuine/ demo/516_microsoft_WGA_en.htm).

If you have a legal and activated copy of Windows, the process is over before you know it, and you never have to go through it again on that computer. It's not clear to me what the program actually does with versions of Windows prior to Win XP or with copies that don't require activation, such as ones with corporate site licenses. But the procedure did run on Windows 2000.

Some people think the program could be a genuine security disaster. A security update from ThreatFocus (www.threatfocus.com) suggests that Microsoft's policy "could dramatically reduce the overall security of the Internet by creating a class of machines that are guaranteed not to have the latest security updates." But that class of insecure machines already exists. I don't think this policy will make things worse.

According to Microsoft, while any downloads from the Microsoft Download Center or the Windows Update site will require that users validate their systems, the Automated Updates system will not require validation. The company says that the vast majority of users get their updates that way.

Clearly, Microsoft has a heavy burden to make sure the procedure runs correctly as close to 100 percent of the time as possible. It seems to have done this with Product Activation and has biased Activation toward letting the software run, as opposed to stopping it. I am sure it will do the same in this case.

On the other hand, if you have Microsoft Internet Explorer's security set to High orheaven forbid!run Firefox or some other "nonstandard" browser, you may run into some problems. But you'd run into such problems with Windows Update, so you might as well solve them anyway.

Whenever I write about Microsoft's antipiracy efforts, I get a few e-mails from users who tell me how easy they are to bypass and where to download the software and keys I need. Putting aside the fact that stealing is wronga point that seems lost on many of these peoplethere is no doubt in my mind that Microsoft would not institute a program like this unless they knew it would make a practical difference.

Microsoft always said activation was about stopping "casual piracy"; the Windows Genuine Advantage program is just more of the same. Activation has not been an issue for more than 99 percent of users, and the same will be true of Windows Genuine Advantage.

Larry Seltzer has been writing software for and English about computers ever sincemuch to his own amazementhe graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1983.
He was one of the authors of NPL and NPL-R, fourth-generation languages for microcomputers by the now-defunct DeskTop Software Corporation. (Larry is sad to find absolutely no hits on any of these +products on Google.) His work at Desktop Software included programming the UCSD p-System, a virtual machine-based operating system with portable binaries that pre-dated Java by more than 10...
More »